


stronger together

by lamourestout



Category: SKAM (Italy)
Genre: But also, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, M/M, Niccoló POV, and, soft boyfriends being soft and in love, talk of:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 12:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18366365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamourestout/pseuds/lamourestout
Summary: continuation/aftermath of s3 ep4 but in the nico/marti world





	stronger together

**Author's Note:**

> i'm back again and i still miss them
> 
> anyway, there's a bit of discussion about the confrontation that happened, and discussions of violence against the LGBT+ community, as well as a bit of nico's own inner fight against a homophobic culture. neither of them say the slur used against marti.

They don’t talk about it until they get home. Until they get back to Marti’s place. But there’s a certain tension between them that hadn’t been there  _ before  _ the confrontation. A bit of distance in Marti’s eyes whenever Nico looks at him, and he’s actually glad they’re at Incanti’s stupid party, because at least he knows they kicked the guys out, and that the wouldn’t let them back in. Maybe he’s not as bad as Nico’s heard. 

They don’t talk about it until they get back to Marti’s, but there’s a very specific distance between them when they’re on the bus, Marti messing with his phone, but still looks up at him and smiles his very  _ Marti _ smile that Nico loves, before moving his phone toward Nico so he can see what everyone’s posted on instagram. Because that’s what’s most important right now, Gio’s pictures of him and Sofia. 

Or maybe, more specifically, they don’t talk about it until they’re in Marti’s  _ room _ , coats hung up by the front door, shoes lined up nicely next to the other’s, and all the lights checked, shut off. Nico brushes his teeth while Marti checks on his mom, and then Marti brushes  _ his  _ teeth while Nico turns on the light in the bedroom. 

Until Marti comes into his bedroom, closing the door softly behind him, and shrugging his hoodie off, tossing it a little too hard into his hamper. It’s a horrible, shaky breath leaves Marti’s chest that makes him move, finally, instead of stand frozen, staring at Marti. They’re not that far away from each other, until they’re as close as they can be, arms wrapped tightly around each other. There’s nothing but Marti’s breath on his neck, and he can feel all the uneven hitches in his breathing, in his heartbeat, in how Marti’s arms keep trying to tighten more, and he, equally, wants Marti as close and as safe as he can possibly have him. Nico has been strikingly sober since the confrontation, drink set aside, and now he’s even more sober. (Night air, the aftermath of rain, the harsh light of the inside of the bus, but now, the safety of Marti’s arms. Offering safety to Marti with his own embrace.)  

He doesn’t even know what to say, he has a million different thoughts racing through his mind, things he  _ could  _ say like  “ _ fuck them, they don’t know what love is, they wouldn’t know it if it bit their dick off _ ” or ...  _ i love you, i love you  _ until he loses his voice and Marti can’t ever forget it or ... “  _ we aren’t sinners, i promise, we’re real, this is real, we can be in love with each other, _ ”  but he doesn’t know what he should say. Just tightens his arms around Marti to keep him safe. 

“She can’t know.” Marti finally says, breaking the silence. Nico makes a little questioning noise in response, even though he knows Marti means  _ his mother _ . Marti’s breathing deeply, before loosening his arms, and Nico does likewise, and Marti lifts his head from it’s comfortable place on Nico’s shoulder. Looks him in the eye with steely determination. “Mamma, she can’t know.” Nico nods, 

“She won’t know.” He promises. Arms around Marti’s shoulders loosen more, hands sliding to rest fully on Marti’s shoulders, sliding up to cup his cheeks, a brush of his thumbs over the skin of Marti’s face. “I love you.” He has to whisper, everything has to be quiet because everything was so loud at the party, it’s all still ringing in his ears. And this is for Marti, only, because apparently people can’t  _ mind their own business _ .  

Part of him wishes they could flaunt it. That they could kiss like Gio and Sofia were, or like any number of the other  _ straight couples  _ could. He wishes he could make out in the courtyard at school like Federico Canegallo and  _ Emma Covitti  _ do, practically fucking each other in the middle of everyone, and no one says  **anything** , but the instant he wants to hold Marti’s hand, it’s a big fucking deal. He wants to flaunt it, and show Marti off, because Marti is the best thing to ever come into his life, and he wants to sit and stare at Marti and hold his hand when they’re hanging out outside of school, and he wants to greet him with a kiss after classes. And he wants to kiss him outside, everywhere. 

He wants to flaunt  _ them _ , but at the same time he knows they can’t, and so if they can’t flaunt it, he’s going to make everything perfect within the privacy of their love. All the parts of their love that are deemed  _ inappropriate  _ by everyone else, are the parts he loves the best. How, apparently, them kissing is going to send them to hell. He thinks this, and decides to spite that idea, replace it with something better and asks, 

“Can I kiss you?” Still making sure that Marti is okay, that he doesn’t want to just get ready for bed, go to sleep, pretend this is all a bad dream. 

“Yeah. Please.” Marti says, and Nico leans in the small distance between them to press his lips against Marti’s. And immediately he feels better.  ( Take  _ that  _ Catholicism.  _ Fuck You! _ )  It feels unreasonably chaste, and he pulls back unreasonably early, wanting to see if maybe it’s made Marti smile. There’s a bit of a smile curving at the edges of Marti’s lips. 

“I love you.” He says again, because Marti can never forget this. “I love you.” Again, and he could just repeat it forever. Marti leans in this time, pressing his lips against Nico’s, and his hands are dancing up Nico’s sides, until they’re mirroring Nico’s hands on Marti’s face. Mirroring them happy in an illusion a dozen minutes before it was shattered by a harsh reality they deserve to forget about right now. Mirroring, except they get to kiss now, they get to let their lips slide against the other’s, 

“Am I overreacting?” Marti asks when he finally pulls away. Nico thinks of when Marti’s mom told him about  _ Martinese,  _ (about how Marti rolled his eyes, blushed a little, let his face bury in crossed arms at the kitchen table while this language was being relayed to Nico, one afternoon) and Marti’s face is screaming in Martinese right now. “It was just a word.” Nico hadn’t had a clear sight of the whole thing, he’d been blocked a bit, and hadn’t wanted to get involved too much, afraid to make the situation worse. (That’s what he thinks, but it could have been him frozen in place, terrified,  _ unable  _ to move.)  

“It’s not just a word,” Nico starts, but he doesn’t know everything, “The whole history of ━ oppression and hatred and hurt and ━ it’s like saying it’s a ━ homemade slingshot when it’s a ━ a ━ cannonball.” It makes him sick, just  _ thinking  _ of the word. Thinking of someone saying it to Marti. (To anyone, really, but in this instance, he’s thinking about Marti.)  Marti’s eyes are a bit hesitant when they meet his again, looking worried, and afraid, and very, very young.  _ He  _ feels young, like they’re still trapped in a half-perfect whirlwind of being teenagers and having friends who accept them, and don’t bat an eye when he kisses Marti. He feels young and like they’re only touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hateful people.  

“Filippo, he ... told me about worse things that happen to people.” He pauses, but there’s an indication he wants to say more, and so Nico lets him gather words, feelings, sort them, say them, “I didn’t flinch, I don’t know  _ how  _ I didn’t flinch, I was worried that guy was going to hurt  **Eva** , first of all, and then he just -- out of  _ nowhere _ , and then the both of them, and then Gio was there and I thought  _ he  _ was going to get hurt, and I didn’t get a chance to think of what they’d do to me.” Another shaky breath, 

“But no one got hurt.” Nico tells him. “And I don’t think ... I mean,” his fingers trace along Marti’s jawline, hands moving, until he has his arms looped over Marti’s shoulders. “Worse things happen to people, but it doesn’t mean you’re overreacting, or that you can’t be upset or ... that you have to feel like you haven’t been through enough or ━” He bites his tongue, forcing what could be an endless stream of words to end. “I think Filippo would be proud of you for standing up to that asshole.” 

“I’m not going to tell him. I mean, he might hear it from someone, but I’m not just going to tell him I got called a ━” His voice cuts off before he says it, eyes dropping, and it’s all tense again. “So ... that’s ... that.” Nico nods, and they stand there, hands on each other, close to each other for a minute, letting breaths be caught, and shaky hands become not-shaky out of sight of the other’s eyes. 

“We should go to bed.” Nico says, and Marti lifts his gaze, more of the smile in his eyes than his lips, but Nico makes a vow to make sure he smiles a real,  _ Marti  _ smile before they fall asleep. Marti leans forward to press another kiss against Nico’s lips, which turns into two, three, five, ten, before Nico ducks down out of Marti’s embrace, moving away a few feet, chuckling a little. “Bed!” But he won’t make a mess of Marti’s room, instead, a crooked smile, shrugging off his black jacket, and hanging it up in Marti’s closet. Where it most certainly doesn’t belong, but  _ maybe  _ Marti will wear it one day, if he leaves it here. 

Marti’s unbuttoning half the buttons on his shirt before pulling it off before moving to his dresser, rummaging around for familiar shirts; the one he always wears the bed, and the one he always offers to Nico, and now, offers to Nico again, who is moving to take it, hand bunching up soft fabric. Marti pulls his shirt on, and Nico chuckles a little, 

“Hold it.” Gives the shirt back to Marti, who takes it, who watches him quickly pull his own shirt off, and then takes Marti’s offered shirt back, sliding it on. It calms him, immediately. Most of the residual tension from the party slips away with the feeling of the slightly room-temperature cool shirt draping over him. Cooling him, just his skin, a degree. A moment of staring, and then they’re moving, jeans discarded on their own sides of the bed.  (They have  _ their sides of a bed _ , how domestic. He wants to say this, say that he loves it.) Sliding under Marti’s covers with familiarity; they might have their own sides of the bed, but the reality is that they really just have their own sides of the center of the bed, because it’s always where they end up. 

Marti shuts the light off, first, though, before they’re letting their legs tangled together under cool sheets, and Nico can feel his body sinking into the mattress, more tired than he felt before. It’s a nice feeling, though, that he  _ knows  _ he’s going to fall asleep. 

Laying on his side, Marti on his side, staring at each other in the dark, it’s something familiar, it’s one of the most familiar feelings of love he feels for Marti. He doesn’t know how to explain it, other than when he has to sleep alone, and he wakes up in the middle of the night, he expects Marti to be there, and sometimes if he knows he’s alone, he just doesn’t open his eyes, and pretends that Marti’s there, but he’s just rolled over a bit further away. And on the few times where he wakes up alone and doesn’t feel a fear of emptiness, and, for a few seconds, a fear that he  _ truly is  _ the last man on earth, he just thinks of Marti, in another part of Rome, hopefully fast asleep, and he just thinks about Marti, everything, anything about Marti until it calms him enough that he can fall back asleep. 

“You know, we do have to talk to Filippo soon,” He starts, and Marti shifts a little, “Because I need to ask him about curtains.” Marti huffs out a little unamused sound, “You know? I’m thinking something that makes a statement. Something that screams ...” purses his lips a moment, and he can just make out enough of Marti’s face to see a half-amused, half-unamused look. But he thinks, mostly, that maybe Marti is looking at him like he loves him, he hopes that what the look is, because he’s going to keep talking, “... I could have spent four hundred euros on these or maybe I made them out of my boyfriend’s mother’s old tablecloths from the nineties.” Marti’s eyes are catching a little bit of light from outside, the slight bits of light that trail in from the window, “Because if I can make things look really fashionable on a budget, then when I’m in university, all my friends will think I’m really cool, and then I’ll have fooled them, because,  _ as you’ve learned _ , I’m a bit weird.” He would, personally, say  _ very  _ weird, with all the weird things he does. 

“Maybe, but if you weren’t weird, then we’d  _ both  _ be boring, and we’d stay in every night and watch the same stuff at the same time every week and ... go to bed before the sun set. And ... we’d always follow the recipe when we made dinner, and never discover the  _ delicacy  _ of carbonara with honey.” This makes Nico laugh, and shift his head closer to Marti’s on the pillow. 

“Do you think your mom would like it if we made dinner tomorrow?” 

“I’m not eating honey carbonara again, no matter how much I love you.” 

“No, no, we’ll make something else. But do you think she’d like that?” He feels a certain connection to Marti’s mom, he can empathize with the lows she gets caught in. He wants to do nice things for Marti, nice things for Marti’s mom. 

“I think so.” And Nico’s face spreads in a wide smile. 

“I’m going to find something really good for us to make, hungover or not, it’s going to be amazing. And you’ll finally see that I  _ am  _ a master chef.” He thinks Marti might counter his claim, but instead he just received a soft, 

“Okay.” Marti’s hand trailing up his arm, until it’s soft and gentle on his cheek. “My talented boyfriend.” Nico wants to kiss him. So he does, an arm moving to pull Marti closer by his waist, and he kisses him, slow.  Leisurely. Like time stands still in the middle of the night, because  _ really _ , it does. Until the sun peeks over familiar buildings outside, it could be any hour. 

“We should sleep,” Nico tries, but it much nicer to kiss Marti and not think about anything else. 

“I love you, I want to kiss you.” Marti tells him, and how is he supposed to argue with that  _ compelling argument _ . And they’re kissing more, tips of their tongues daring to reach out and dance a little, but it returns to just lips moving against lips, and eventually dwindles down to what can barely amount to kissing because Nico is feeling the tiredness of being up for probably twenty hours at this point, it’s catching up to him. 

“You make me brave, Nì,” Marti breathes out, falling-asleep qualities drifting into his tone. “I’d take on every homophobic asshole to make sure none of them got to you.” Nico feels his heart speed up a bit, and he’s letting his hand bunch up in Marti’s shirt. 

“You are brave. You’re very brave and strong and I love you very much.” He never wants Marti to have to confront someone ever again. He wants to live in their bubble of safety. Marti’s breathing is slowing a little, drifting more toward sleep, and Nico thinks he’s fallen asleep, and maybe he, himself, has almost fallen asleep when Marti’s quiet voice says, 

“Nì?” 

“Yeah?” A moment, and he thinks maybe Marti fell asleep before he could finish his thought. 

“You’re very brave, very strong, and I love  _ you _ .” Nico doesn’t think there’s anything more for them to say tonight, anything more can be said in the morning, or whenever it will be said, but for now, he just lets his tiredness sweep over his body, and lets himself fall asleep close to Marti. 


End file.
